Apollo Hospitals brings in Robot-assisted Bariatric Surgery

Addressing a press conference on Tuesday, Dr. Rajkumar Palaniappan, consultant, Apollo Hospital, said that robotic surgery provided good or even better results than laparoscopy. The downside was it would cost at least Rs.1.75 lakh more than a laparoscopic procedure.

Advantages

The advantages included high precision, increased ergonomic flexibility of the robotic arm inside a patient's body, lesser blood loss, a pain score of 4/10 as compared to 6/10 for laparoscopy and quicker turnaround time for the patient.

Robotic-assisted surgery has applications for all three standard bariatric surgery protocols - gastric band, sleeve gastrectomy and gastric bypass. The hospital is also looking to tap into the other advantage of robotic surgery - remote location procedure - by having a surgeon sitting at the computer console in Chennai operate upon a patient in Kolkata.

Apollo Hospitals, which has already introduced robotic-assisted procedure for urology and gynaecology, is also aiming to set up robotic equipment at more of its centres.

""Training in this speciality is easier with a surgeon able to pick robotic-assisted surgery skills in a year or so while it takes five to six years for an open procedure surgeon to master laparoscopy"", Dr. Palaniappan said. A training programme in robotic bariatric surgery has also been proposed to be started. Michael Cameron, a patient from Scotland, said that he decided to undergo robotic bariatric surgery at Apollo as his efforts at dietary control failed to provide a lasting solution to his obesity.